6. Music Editor Free

Another free version of a commercial package, Music Editor Free comes with a significant restriction: it can only save WAV files.

If you can live with that, though (you can always use a converter to get the format you need), there are plenty of compensations, lke a modern, ribbon-based interface; CD ripping and burning; quick and easy view control, with lots of mouse and keyboard shortcuts; powerful noise reduction tools; plenty of useful effects, an ID3 tag editor and more.

We found one or two issues, too (the YouTube downloader didn't work for us), but Music Editor Free still offers more functionality than most of the competition.

9. mp3DirectCut

mp3DirectCut is a tiny (122KB) dedicated MP3 editor and recorder while allows you to cut, copy, paste or adjust volume without re-encoding (which means there's no loss in sound quality).

The program interface is a little basic, and it doesn't have the same range of effects you'll see in some of the competition.

mp3DirectCut can adjust gain, create simple fades or normalise audio, though, and there are auto crop and pause detection tools, as well as an ID3v1.1 tag editor. And if you're looking for a straightforward MP3 editor then it could be a very good choice.